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Terpstra: Don't panic over Novell-Microsoft deal

Life is interesting, isn't it? Who would have guessed at the number of changes in our industry over the past 12 months?

My first reaction to the news of Microsoft's support for Linux was: "Wow! incredible!" Oh, I guess that was the reaction all round.

Then I re-read the Microsoft-Novell announcement and thought about it some more. I wonder if the wording of the announcement is designed to stir up those within the open source movement/community who are branded by the "establishment" as radicals. You know, that is not the first time that has happened!

Taking the high road

My alarm bells are ringing, not because of the announcement but rather over concern that those of us who strive the hardest to protect our liberties might overreact and, in the process, do long-term injury to the cause for liberties in respect of software development.

The patent cross licensing dealthat Microsoft and Novell unveiled last Thursday will be incompatible with the GPL3 license and is likely incompatible with the current GPL2 license, alleged Eben Moglen, a law professor and open source activist.

Section seven of the current general public license (GPL2) prohibits people or corporations from distributing the GPL code if they have entered into anyagreements that contradict the conditions of the license.

It's a dog eat dog world, and anyone surprised at Novell's new "partnership" hasn't been watching Novell's piss poor financial performance these last few years.

When the stockholders are looking for heads to put on a pike, you know something is going to change.

Of course I find it amusing that all the tales of devil worship and open source woes come mostly from people using OpenSuse and not from the people who actually supported Novell/SUSE financially by buying licenses. For those that have SUSE enterprise, nothing changes, except that future release might have better AD integration because of the partnership.

Go figure, a company the size of Novell would actually have to sell products and services so that they can employ all their workers and still make a profit to keep their stockholders happy.

Kind of ironic (in a sad way), the once mighty Novell that was champion of the Networked PC market and ate Microsoft's lunch now has to partner up with them in order to stay a float.

More in Tux Machines

Jessie Release Date: 2015-04-25

We now have a target release date of Saturday the 25th of April. We
have checked with core teams, and this seems to be acceptable for
everyone. This means we are able to begin the final preparations for
a release of Debian 8 - "Jessie".
The intention is only to lift the date if something really critical
pops up that is not possible to handle as an errata, or if we end up
technically unable to release that weekend.
Please keep in mind that we intend to have a quiet period from
Saturday the 18th of April. Bug fixes must be *in Jessie* before
then.

Before ending out March, here's some new OpenGL Linux benchmarks comparing the closed-source Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver against the Linux 4.0 development kernel with Mesa 10.6 Git for the freshest open-source graphics driver code.

5 questions to determine if open source is a good fit for a software project

A benefit of open source in general, and commercial open source in particular, is that you have the support of others as well as the ability to do the maintenance yourself.
I hope these questions will help you determine whether open source is a good fit for your next software project. Let me know if there are other questions you would add to this list.

Clonezilla Live 2.4.0-7 Released to Fix a Btrfs Issue, Based on Debian Sid

Steven Shiau has released a new development version of his Clonezilla Live operating system aimed at system administrators who want an easy-to-use, portable, and straightforward solution for cloning disk drives.

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Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

The LibreOffice project was announced with great fanfare in September 2010. Nearly one year later, the OpenOffice.org project (from which LibreOffice was forked) was cut loose from Oracle and found a new home as an Apache project. It is fair to say that the rivalry between the two projects in the time since then has been strong. Predictions that one project or the other would fail have not been borne out, but that does not mean that the two projects are equally successful. A look at the two projects' development communities reveals some interesting differences.

11 Ways That Linux Contributes to Tech Innovation

Over the past six months I've asked new Linux Foundation corporate members on the cutting edge of technology to weigh in on what interesting or innovative trends they're witnessing and the role that Linux plays in them. Here's what engineers, CTOs, and other business leaders from companies including CoreOS, Rackspace, SanDisk, and more had to say.